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Events
Apr. 7 | MAASA Joint Conference—April, 2011
Joint conference on material culture, April 7-11, 2011, UW-Madison
Publications: ASA Guide for Reviewing American Studies Programs
The External Review
By external, we mean both the review of the program undertaken by campus administrators and by faculty groups not affiliated with the program (e.g., by a campus program review committee) and the review of the program undertaken by scholars from other schools. Sometimes of course the external committee will mix on-campus and off-campus members. The dynamics of the external review process can certainly be affected by who the external reviewers are. It is one thing to be interviewed by, say, a physicist from one’s own campus who sits on the campus’ program review committee; another to be interviewed by a professor of U.S. history from another college that doesn’t itself have an American Studies program; another to be interviewed by a professor who is an active member of a successful American Studies program elsewhere. Still, certain considerations will likely apply, more or less, to any form the external review may take.
Identifying External Reviewers
Needless to say, identifying appropriate external reviewers is critical to the review’s value. The local program will unlikely have much say over any on-campus reviewers involved. But the program typically will be (and should be) invited to suggest possible external reviewers, if any are to be used, generally in the form of a list from which program administrators will select one or more.
Undoubtedly the program’s faculty will have in mind scholars from other schools whom they believe would be effective and supportive reviewers. But they should also contact the heads of American Studies programs at comparable campuses to discover whether those programs have recently undergone a review and whether any particular external scholars in those reviews were particularly helpful. Another valuable resource is the national office of the American Studies Association, which can offer suggestions about experienced reviewers.
The qualities that a local program will want in a reviewer are obvious but bear repeating. First, the program will want faculty that the campus review agencies will respect as highly qualified—faculty, for example, who have strong reputations as a scholar. Second, the program will want faculty who have been actively involved in the American Studies movement and deeply understand current intellectual trends, teaching agendas, and other issues in the field. The program should try to discourage the administration’s appointment of a scholar who may be an excellent researcher in some area of, say, U.S. history or literature but who has no demonstrable record of sympathy for interdisciplinary research and teaching and no record of significant contributions to American Studies Association meetings and similar activities. Third, the program will want if at all possible to find scholars who have been actively involved with an American Studies or similar interdisciplinary program on their own campus. There’s nothing that makes for a sympathetic understanding of those problems like having had to wrestle with the concrete problems of such programs on a day-to-day basis . Fourth, at least one of the external reviewers should have had some significant experience as a chair or major officer of a successful American Studies or similar program, particularly an officer who has a reputation for political savvy, diplomatic skill, and expertise in campus protocols and administrative processes. The review report’s analyses and recommendations will likely have more influence if they show an understanding of the problems a campus administrator will face in trying to implement those recommendations.
Organizing Participants for External Reviewers’ Interviews and Meetings
The meetings and interviews organized as part of the external review will vary significantly from campus to campus. For example, review committee members may interview core and affiliated faculty singly or in groups. Reviewers will likely want to talk to undergraduates majors and, where appropriate, with graduate students. On many campuses, separate meetings are also often arranged for other relevant constituencies, e.g., women, minority students, lesbian and gay students, re-entry students, etc. Staff members also should be interviewed. And of course important meetings will be arranged with key administrators and faculty program review groups.
The program’s leadership should organize prior meetings with those of these constituencies who participate in the program itself. The point of those meetings should not be to co-opt participants or to prevent individuals from expressing their convictions when speaking to the external reviewers. Rather, these prior meetings can usefully inform those in attendance of what’s at stake in the review, give them a sense of the reviewers’ backgrounds and interests, suggest the kinds of questions the reviewers will be interested in pursuing, and so forth. The meetings can even serve as a rehearsal of any disagreements among participants over program goals and elements—a rehearsal that may help the program’s leaders themselves in interpreting the dynamics, achievements, and problems of the program to the reviewers. At best, these prior meetings may serve as a kind of pre-game warm-up that sends participants into the contest with heightened morale. They may also help meetings with the reviewers from turning merely into gripe sessions.
The program’s leaders can usefully remind themselves that their students and staff members are among the best ambassadors of the program. If their students are happy with the education they’re getting in the program, they should be given an opportunity to advertise this fact fully to the external reviewers. If they have criticisms of the program, they should be given a chance to discuss those criticisms in advance with the program’s faculty (in a safe context) and given a chance to think of how they express those criticisms to the external reviewers in a way that will help rather than hurt the program. A program’s staff are typically not only very able and very devoted to the program but a key element in what makes the program work well. They also often serve as a rich oral archive for the program’s history. If they can explain clearly the program’s goals and strategies, they add considerably to reviewers’ impression of program coherence and quality.
Interacting with the External Reviewers
With few exceptions (and, if the negotiations suggested above are pursued early and creatively enough, many of these exceptions can be avoided), external reviewers of a program will not be out to “get” the program. Certainly the off-campus reviewers, if experienced reviewers who are also active in the American Studies Association, will generally be predisposed to focus on ways in which they can be helpful to the program. This does not at all mean that they will hide their eyes from weaknesses in the program or from problems the program is facing. On the contrary, they will carry radar that quickly picks up such signals. So a key strategy of the members of the program being reviewed should be: be frank and forthcoming with the reviewers about the problems the program is facing, let the reviewers know what the program is doing to try to solve the problems, and invite them to suggest constructive solutions or propose several potentially viable options. The problems may be internal—conflict among several core faculty, withdrawal of affiliated faculty, dropping enrollments, students’ dissatisfaction with certain courses. Or they may be external—poor relations with English or History departments or Ethnic Studies or Women’s Studies programs; the hostility of the dean to whom the program reports. In either situation, full knowledge of the problem will increase the likelihood that the external reviewers can generate some recommendations that will be both diplomatic and effective.
Being Clear About Priorities
Typically, external reviewers are asked to review too many things. They are overloaded with information and, in a very short space of time, must sift through it to sort out the more relevant from the less relevant. They are typically asked to respond to too many questions about the program, relatively minor issues often being mixed rather indiscriminately with more major issues. Experienced reviewers will, with some effort, be able to thread this thicket. But the program’s leaders can be of considerable help to them in this effort, both by making clear in the self-study what the program itself believes to be the most critical issues and by stressing those issues again as early as possible in the leaders’ interactions with the reviewers.
As part of the sorting and problem-solving process, the external reviewers need time with each other. The most productive review schedules give reviewers a chance to talk to each other about their initial impressions of the program before their meetings with administrators, faculty, and others begin. The reviewers then need several opportunities to check in regularly with each other about what they’ve observed and heard in their interviews and meetings. If the review schedule extends over a two-day period, they should probably be given several hours by themselves at the end of the first day. And they need another block of time to themselves before any exit interviews. The program’s leaders can do the reviewers—and the program—a favor by making sure that the administrator coordinating the review schedule builds in such opportunities. The quality of the review will be all the better for it.
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